Apple rejects EU’s Artificial Intelligence Pact

The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Pact lists non-binding commitments that presage some of the binding rules that firms will face under the bloc’s AI Act in coming years, but it got off to a rocky start on Wednesday as Apple and Meta Platforms rejected the pact.
Pieter Haeck and Mathieu Pollet for Politico:
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It was initiated by former EU digital commissioner Thierry Breton, who stepped down from his role earlier this month after clashing with his boss, President Ursula von der Leyen.

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MacDailyNews Take: In July, Breton, who’ll never be mistaken for a genius, publicly warned Elon Musk to respect the E.U.’s censorship laws during a then-pending interview with U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump. A coalition of civil libertarians promptly called out the authoritarian-wannabe Breton for his blatant disregard for freedom of speech. Musk responded to Breton with a meme from the film Tropic Thunder: “Take a big step back and literally, fuck your own face!”

Both Meta and Apple weren’t on the list of signatories presented Wednesday, hours before the Pact was officially launched at the EU headquarters in Brussels. France’s artificial intelligence champion Mistral was also not among the signatories, nor was video-sharing platform TikTok or Anthropic, a leading American AI firm.
The failure to corrall support among some of the world’s leaders developing cutting-edge AI models shows how governments, including in the EU, still grapple with how to impose instant controls on the fast-developing technology…
It also showed a mood shift among some tech firms in their support for regulatory controls on AI. A campaign led by Meta this month warned that “in recent times, regulatory decision-making has become fragmented and unpredictable” and that the EU risked missing out on AI technology that could “turbocharge productivity.”
Specifically, tech firms including Meta, X and others have held back on rolling out AI products in Europe after exchanges with Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, which enforces Europe’s powerful privacy rulebook, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), on many Big Tech firms with regional headquarters in the country. Apple, too, decided to not roll out new AI-fueled features on its latest iPhone model in Europe over regulatory concerns.

MacDailyNews Take: Again, the single biggest reason why the EU doesn’t innovate because of onerous, stifling European Union red tape.
The European Union arose because the Europeans couldn’t compete on their own with the rest of the world, so they each lined up to surrender their national sovereignty, unique cultures, and dignity for an undemocratic, opaque, wasteful, bloated, bureaucratic quasi-governmental blob – and, even with the EU’s thumbs all over the scale, they still can’t compete. — MacDailyNews, March 4, 2024

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